Hey, Hey, Get Outta My Way

I just got back from California, after a trucking trip that both sort of elated and depressed me.  It's hard sometimes to describe conflicting feelings in this particular
medium, but I'll try.

It's been about seven days and six thousand kilometres since I last blogged (It has been three months since my last confession).  I feel burnt out and
exhausted, as though the sleep I got last night was the only real sleep in the world.  I'm stiff, and muscles ache that I'm not concious of having used in days.  I
sit at the computer and realise that I'm unconciously sitting in a similar position to the position I adopt when driving a Kenworth W900.  The sore muscles seem
to be generating enormous amounts of heat, so that I'm not quite comfortable anywhere or in any position.

There's a mental dissociation as well, a feeling of having unplugged from my life and returning to find that no-one's noticed you being gone.  The SO sure
noticed; but I have no job and there's that feeling that if I hadn't come home, who'd care?  No boss to miss me, and a group of friends spread over several
thousand kilometres, some of whom I haven't seen in the flesh in years anyway.  I realize that last statement may seem depressed, and perhaps I am, in a little
way.  Especially now that I linked to a series I've generally loathed lo these few years.

But you're not to be concerned; this isn't deep dark depression that leads to things like wearing gloves with the fingers cut off, or wandering around town
clutching a paper bag whispering loudly "The Kaiser will steal my string!" (*Attribution)  This is more the sort of idiosyncratic melancholia that leads to sitting
about in one's bathrobe, blogging, when one should be, perhaps, doing something constructive.

{A cat is bothering me.  One of the more odd-seeming things about this last and with any luck final truck trip is how easily I forgot about the cats entirely.  Even
though I live with two of them, once out of sight they disappeared so completely from my field of view that I was vaguely surprised to find when I
came home that I live with two of them.}

I left a week ago, Friday the ninth.  The owner of the particular truck I was driving picked me up at the ferry terminal and drove me to the repair shop where the
truck was actually parked.  I was nervous getting in (although for obvious reasons I didn't mention this to him), but managed to negotiate my way to the highway
without incident.

The loading was pretty straightforward.  The benefit of subcontracting to this company is that they have a regular run with paper products, courtesy of Norske Skog
and its various clients who range from the L.A. Times to Verizon (see also corporate malfeasance).  This means that most of the trucks wind up in
Cally-foh-niuh.  After dropping off (it's always only one drop), the trucks then await loading with produce.

The trip to Los Angeles was pretty cool.  I left after loading, some six hours after coming on duty, missed the first available ferry and had to wait for the next. 
Nine hours after I started out that day I was on shore, over the border (more about the border later if I get a round tuit).  By law, I was obliged to stop
somewhere in Warshington state.  But I really didn't feel like it, and I had to have the load in City of Industry on Sunday night.

It's 25 hours down.  Under the new rules, I can run 11 hours, then have to take the rest of the day off, basically.  But what I actually did was throw away my
log page (Note:  I have just confessed to an act which is both a misdemeanor and a federal crime--or maybe just a youthful indiscretion--in two countries--online, so let's pretend this is only a
hypothetical situation) and write a new one, which stated that I had left from a location about 150 Km and one less ferry ride away.

This allowed me to keep rolling through my second wind, until I'd been driving about 10½ hours, and technically awake and on duty for something around 18
hours.  I had a bath in some undeveloped hot pools by the highway in Oregon, close to Bend.  Actually, the hot pools, while not exactly secret, remain
unspoiled-ish because comparatively few people know their location--they're really several hundred miles from Bend.  But perhaps there are some in Bend that
you might like to visit.

After a warm soak, I found myself unable to sleep, so I kept rolling.  It wasn't necessary to modify my log book, due to the rewriting I'd already done.  About
eight hours later I was in Lodi, CA.  I got ten hours of luxurious sleep, then got up and rolled on to C of I.  I offloaded at roughly three Pip Emma Sunday.  Then I
drove an hour-and-a-half up to Castaic (an explanation of truck parking in most North American cities follows if I feel like it).

If you're lucky, you might get a load home with a single pickup.  If not (and far more likely), you do what the drivers call "grocery shopping".  Basically you
wander all over California picking up goods from many, many, different places.  A standard California-legal 48' refrigerated trailer can hold up to 26 pallets
loaded sideways.  Depending on the aggregate weight of your entire load (which your dispatcher is supposed to figure out before sending you to pick up that
"one-more" pallet), you may have to configure the load in a way that lets you hold less--maybe a lot less.

The total weight varies.  In the current time of the season, for example, lettuce, normally a medium-weight sort of load at about 900-1000 pounds per pallet, is
growing small and very dense. 
 
This means they're heavier, and also that more of them fit into a box (in fruit and veg  they distinguish between sizes by saying
that a "24-count" item fits 24 to a box, whereas the same box may fit 18 "18-count" items, which are larger--duh).  So a pallet (skid, board) of lettuce right now
weighs something more like 1200 lbs.  So repeat that 300-lb variation twenty times, and you're looking at six thousand extra pounds.

In this particular instance I had seven pickups.  My personal record is eighteen, but I've heard of people getting partial-pallet loads at up to twenty-seven
different places.  I went to: King City (one pickup), Salinas (four picks), Watsonville (strawberries--yum!), Gilroy, at Christopher Ranch (also yum, but savoury vice sweet), and
wandered across the state to Livingston for yams and sweet potatoes.

Now it hardly bears stating that the length and nature of your day is entirely subject to the vagaries of the various refrigerated warehouses you must visit to
make these pickups, as well as things such as whether the broker has been selling fruit that in fact is still on a tree somewhere instead of in a box on the dock.  This means that grocery-shopping drivers must take something of a lax attitude toward legal compliance. 
 
In my case, I was held overnight at my final Salinas
pickup until nearly noon the following day.  As I understand the regulations, I was technically on duty from the time I got up (7:00 AM) onwards.  But do you
think I recorded five of my available eleven precious duty/driving hours spent reading "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" as on-duty time?

Go on, give your head a shake.

As it was, due to the distance between my final few pickups, I wasn't finished loading until six PM.  By this time, I had technically run out of duty hours again
(hypothetically speaking, remember?).  Nonetheless, I was good for another six hours or so according to my log book.  I slept that night just inside the California
state line, near Klamath Falls Oregon. Next day I drove to Vancouver BC.  Simple, huh?  I even had time to go for a swim on the way home.

By normal standards, this wasn't a difficult trip or load, but the aftereffects have me just about convinced of a principal truth which I shall shortly unveil.

I'm not a trucker anymore.

There were the usual small screw-ups relating specifically to how this particular truck owner operates.  There are the physical and mental aftereffects, although
given time I could deal with those.
 
But the real killer came when I dropped the truck off.
The other driver was doing his walk around when he came to the passenger or "blind" side of the trailer and asked:  "Hey--how'd that happen?"

"That" was a series of long black squiggly lines known in the trade as "rub marks" running down the trailer.  Bad enough that they were there.  Slightly worse
that I had no idea where they'd come from.  But worst of all was that in six thousand kilometres I hadn't noticed them.  I was ashamed.
 
I'm pretty sure I didn't
actually cause them, though.  See, another aspect of no longer being a trucker is that I was having a really hard time backing.  I won't go into the intracacies of reversing an articulated
truck-trailer combination sixty-five feet long into a narrow loading dock or parking spot between two other rigs, but it's definitaly a skill, two parts learned and
one part intuitive.  And it's a skill that I seem to have lost.  So I'd pretty much been following a pattern of "back twenty feet, GOAL, repeat as necessary" (GOAL:
 Get Out And Look).  I'm sure that given sufficient time, I'd be able to reacquire the necessary skills, but I find my interest a bit blunted.

So what I suspect caused these long black lines is this:  At some point, while I was parked at the overcrowded Castaic Giant Truck Stop, but was up the road
grocery shopping (in the personal sense--buying food for self rather than taking on produce by the ton) someone reversed up against my trailer.  This person,
as is not uncommon in these circs, noticed the marks from his trailer gently rubbing against mine, and fled the scene.  I returned to find the slot next door empty,
and never bothered looking at the side of the trailer.

I am no longer a trucker.

 I intend to write something on this transition to Geist mag.  Something about the freefall feeling of having defined yourself for eighteen years by a
term that you no longer feel you can honestly wear.

So what am I?  I've been trying to refer to myself as a professional writer lately.  But most of my recent writing effort is on the screen before you,
and I'm hardly getting paid for it am I? And apart from that, most of my work has been rewarded only in pizza and sometimes beer.  Not that I'd complain, but the
landlady won't accept pepperoni, you see.

The whole thing is really kind of depressing.  On the other hand, I find a certain ragged renewal in this.  A committment to carry on pecking at the professional
writing tree until it yields me up some juicy bugs, or something.

It's now two days after my trip ended.  I want to get out, get on with my life.  And I'd like to pretend I'm not feeling any sort of regret at the feeling that I've finally
stopped being that which I returned to school two years ago to stop being.

But I do.